09 July 2010

Predators

The last few years in franchise-horror have been about undoing the damage wreaked in the last-few-years before that. You know, today’s cynical, miserablist audiences won’t go for anything campy, or for that bonkers outer space shit. So Michael Bay applies the grungy, washed-out look to all the series that had been pushed to the limits of absurdity or tedium: Friday the 13th atones for Jason X, A Nightmare on Elm Street nullifies Freddy vs. Jason. The new “don’t call it a reboot” Predators seems to spring from that trend: it’s a totally cool franchise do-over that pretends something like, say, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem never happened. The only difference between this and Platinum Dunes’ assembly-line folderol is that Predators has a much more impressive pedigree, and as a result it’s actually pretty awesome.